There has never been a better time for contemplation
INNER CALM TIPS:
An old man was always praying in the same spot in the mosque, day in and day out, month in and month out, year in and year out.
The whole mosque community knew him for his habits and always respected that in him.
Until the earthquake and peoples’ houses, belongings and family members had been lost forever. The mosque experienced an influx of newly converted believers, praying alongside the old man. Fajr in, fajr out, day in, day out.
The old man could not hold it together anymore and one day, upon entering his mosque, he made a loud announcement: ’Oh people of the earthquake make a space for me and give me back my spot’.
The moral of this story is that we all receive a calling to Iman through our lives constantly, and sometimes it takes a national tragedy to wake us up from heedlessness.
We can ask ourselves a question, how many of us are the Covid 19 people?
How many of us are safe from such spiritual bypassing and are ready to face our Ihsan, our deep fears and weaknesses in Tawakkul?
So we find ourselves in testing times, social isolation, limited outing options, but also working from homes or losing our jobs all together. Home-schooling options had never been as real as it appears today, and our relationship issues can no longer be avoided in the rush of mundane duties. We have no choice, we are facing it all right now, under the roofs of our own homes.
But are we really? How centering is the over-reliance on social media? How helpful is re-watching news, feeding our brain and spirit with anxieties and fueling our inner self with new statistics?
We had been both entertained and programmed by social media with Armageddon like visions.
We had also been taught to remember the signs of the Last Hour haven’t we? But are those just fairy-tales, stories we heard sometimes in the mosque, things we had been told as a children? Is our faith in the Day of Judgment and signs of the Last Hour real? Are those truly our informed choices, an oath we took to live our life by? Do we go through life with consciousness or we just going with the flow and getting lost in transactions of the Dunya?
The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) said: “O Muhajirun, (emigrants from Makkah to al-Madinah) you may be afflicted by five things; God forbid that you should live to see them… if fornication should become widespread, you should realize that this has never happened without new diseases befalling the people which their forebears never suffered.” (Ibn Majah]
There has never been a better time for such contemplation but now.
In those moments when we see people losing their humanness, giving into their basic instincts of survival and being controlled by anxieties and egoism I ask myself a question are we not facing magnificent examples of a fine line between believer and non-believer. Aren’t we supposed to be steadfast, support one another, look for positiveness and holistic cure?
‘Allah has sent down both the disease and the cure, and He has appointed a cure for every disease, so treat yourselves medically, but use nothing unlawful.” [Abu Dawud}. The Prophet (ﷺ) said, “There is no disease that Allah has created, except that He also has created its treatment.” (Bukhari).
The majority of us will rarely look into nature and consider herbs, homeopathy or power foods to energize their body and prevent weak immunity. We are conditioned to give the power of self-healing away to those who have a license – doctors. We gave the inner powers to maintain our inner calm to counsellors, imams and Youtube speakers.
Where did we disappear, how did we lose our freedom? There have never been better times for such contemplation than now.